In traditional computer science curricula, students view program implementation as the end product and not the means to obtaining some further result. All too often students complete an implementation at the last minute, perform a minimal amount of testing and call the assignment done! This paper discusses an approach we have taken in our courses to have students use and develop programs as part of a scientific inquiry. In addition to causing students to perform more thorough testing, our approach also improves empirical and critical thinking skills.

In an effort to improve the communication skills of students, many universities are requiring computer science educators to include writing and speaking components in their courses. This paper describes an alternative to the classic term paper assignment. A "student conference" approach has been successfully employed in a junior-level computer systems course for five semesters. Each student performs an implementation and experimental study, then writes a research-style technical paper on this work. Students also participate in an anonymous review process, revise their own papers, and make oral presentations of their work. The structure of this conference approach, representative assignments, and observations are presented.

A typical Data Structures (CS 2) course covers a wide variety of topics: elementary algorithm analysis; data structures including dynamic structures, trees, tables, graphs, etc.; large programming projects; and more advanced object-oriented concepts. Integrating these topics into assignments is a challenging task; educators often duplicate work done by others in re-inventing such assignments. At the same time, these assignments and large programs take time to develop and are often changed from semester to semester to preclude cheating. We report on a project that provides modules containing many kinds of programming and lab assignments which can be re-used across semesters with accessible and exciting application-oriented materials. Our project is a collaboration between a research and teaching oriented private university, a teaching oriented public university, and a teaching oriented historically black university. This helps ensure that the modules will be accessible to nearly all student populations. The modules developed are available electronically as hyper-text documents.

Shared memory multiprocessors are attractive because they are programmed in a manner similar to uniprocessors. The UMA class of shared memory multiprocessors is the most attractive, from the programmer's point of view, since the programmer need not be concerned with the placement of code and data in the physical memory hierarchy. Scalable shared memory multiprocessors, on the other hand, tend to present at least some degree of non-uniformity of memory access to the programmer, making the NUMA class an important one to consider. In this paper, we investigate the role that DUnX, an operating system supporting dynamic page placement on a BBN GP1000, might play in simplifying the memory model presented to the applications programmer. We consider a case study of psolu, a real scientific application originally targeted for a NUMA architecture. We find that dynamic page placement can dramatically improve the performance of a simpler implementation of psolu targeted for an UMA memory architec...